Correct Spelling is Misandry! A Memeday Open Thread

@Orion
Wow. Thanks! You are awesome.

I just now did the Otter’s task thingie–very well set up. I wish her luck with her research.

@ LG

Do you have a specific publication of hers in mind? I’ve read Why Him, Why Her some years ago, but I don’t remember much of it.

@ Dalillama

I’m not denying that spelling has some practical value. If it had none it would not be a thing. In the grand scheme of things though, it’s pretty insignificant, and if you should choose to emphasize it on aesthetic grounds, be aware that’s a personal choice and there’s room for considerable disagreement.

@ Lady Mondegreen

Thank you. I’m actually okay with trans folks shouting at me. (It’s only happened once.) I understand they feel sieged, and I can restrain myself from voicing opinions that touch on their identity around them. If I don’t manage that, it’s on me. I would prefer to have beliefs that never hurt anyone, but that’s not possible.

I’m more bothered by how hostility against the whole concept of femininity is making me de facto sexist (I’m even more hostile toward traditional masculinity because it’s disgusting and evil, but I have no power to hurt the people who represent it), and by how having obligatory gender imposed on me feels like violence. I know it’s an injustice that’s being committed against me, and it isn’t on me to fix that. But I still feel like my life would be better if I could feel less violated by changing the way I perceive things.

As for the spelling thing–I’ll just say this. Shaming somebody for poor spelling or idiosyncratic grammar that because they grew up poor, were under-educated, have cognitive disabilites, etc. is certainly wrong. It does not follow that it is always wrong to shame people for poor spelling and grammar. I simply do not believe that the people making these memes don’t know how to spell words that are central to their worldview, or, unable to spell those words, they aren’t capable of correcting errors after someone points it out.

I’m not going to say it’s wrong to mock bad spelling. If I have, I spoke carelessly and take it back. I don’t necessarily believe that. I’m making a weaker claim, which is that it makes me uneasy for reasons I think are pretty solid. I’m open to being convinced there are other factors I’m not considering, that change the big picture.

I don’t think it’s possible to mock bad spelling while only targeting some bad spellers but not the rest. When you mock something, you are saying that thing is worthy of scorn and ridicule, ie. wrong, embarrassing or shameful. Saying that is may be felt by anyone who has that thing and doesn’t have the skin of a hippopotamus. You can’t direct it at some cases but not others.

Let me illustrate what I hear when behaviors by healthy people that kinda look like the symptoms of my disability are being mocked. Details have been changed because I’m not in fact dyslexic.
Person who thinks bad spelling is mockworthy: “Ha ha ha! Look at that jackass, he spelled wrong, how funny is that!”
Me, in a parallel universe where I’m dyslexic: “Oh yeah, huh, I guess that’s funny, heh heh”
PWTBSIM: “Oh but I don’t mean, like, you! You’re different! It’s not funny at all when you spell badly, you’re disabled and that’s why you spell badly, and that’s not funny! It’s sad! I feel bad for you because you’re disabled, and I’d never laugh when YOU spell badly. It’s not your fault. It’s only those other bad spellers who are funny, because they could spell right if they wanted, but you couldn’t, so it’s not. We all understand you couldn’t spell correctly if you tried. Bad spelling is only funny when it’s not sad!”

Can you see what I mean?

dust bunny –

“Do you have a specific publication of hers in mind? I’ve read Why Him, Why Her some years ago, but I don’t remember much of it.”

Why Him, Why Her would be a good one to revisit because it’s where she talks in the most depth about personality brain systems. But I also recommend this lecture entitled Gender Differences In The Brain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSGd6Ojuw0Q

Which is, of course, misleadingly titled IMO. Like I said, she’s determined to sing to a cishetero binary tune. But she also does interesting things like point to Hillary Clinton as an example of someone she thinks is primarily a testosterone-systems thinker, and Bill Clinton as an estrogen-systems thinker. And in her book, she also argues that the genius of Charles Darwin was estrogenic.

In discovering her stuff, I found the notion that females are commonly primarily testosteronic and males commonly primarily estrogenic to be pretty revolutionary. One study she did put the numbers at something like 1 in 5 being “wrong.” Mind you, that’s a seperate thing from experiencing sex dysphoria (or, as in my case, a vague sense, not of my body being wrong, but like, shouldn’t there be another setting, here?).

Another things I found very usefully paradigm-changing in her research is that she points out that the common societal notion of gender being zero-sum (you’re EITHER feminine OR masculine in your personality) is bullocks: you can be high in both testosterone and estrogen brain systems! You can also be low in both, and your personality can be more heavily reliant on the non-gendered dopamine and serotonin systems.

But by far the most useful thing she presents are her models of what kind of thinking testosterone and estrogen brain systems are good it. In a nutshell, testosterone brains systems = decisiveness, competitiveness and win-lose thinking, sequential thinking, ambition and hierarchical social organizing, while estrogen brain systems = contingent, open-ended thinking, cooperative and win-win thinking, “web” or systems thinking, empathy, imagination and non-hierarchical social organizing.

I think our social notions of femininity and masculinity contain some of these concepts, but gender roles are largely concerned with maintaining the patriarchy and are men/masculinity-centric. For example, I remember being told as a youngster that women are “naturally submissive” and men are “naturally dominant.” Even if you think that men=testosterone and women=estrogen (which is WAY wrong), that’s bullocks because estrogenic isn’t “submissive,” it’s dismissive of the entire question of dominance/submission.

So basically, this is how I make my peace between my feminism and trans politics.

I have trouble understanding the basic premises of her model. In the YouTube video she shows a pie chart at one point that breaks people’s personality profiles into 4 sections, like “40% testosterone, 33% estrogen, 20% dopamine, 7% serotonin” or whatever. But when she explains the systems she constantly positions them as opposed pairs — dopamine-system drives are the opposite of serotonin-system drives, and testosterone traits correspond to incompatible estrogen traits.

What it would mean to have strong testosterone *and* estrogen systems isn’t addressed in the video (I’m not sure the possibility is mention), nor it would mean for both dopamine and serotonin to be dominant.

Orion –

Dunno what to tell you, really, except that never seemed to confusing to me. Brains and personalities are complicated and contain multitudes, so why would “contradictory” mean “mutually exclusive” or “must be in a zero-sum relationship to each other”?

I can tell you that I scored as highly estrogenic on her test and only slightly more highly testosteronic, which seems quite right. So I *can* talk to you about my experience of being me. For example, I’m both highly competitive AND highly cooperative, and one way this manifests is that I enjoy (rhetorically) beating antagonistic trolls into submission and forcing them into consensus-building and cooperative talk whether they like it or not.

See, it’s not that I don’t get that cooperation and competition are mutually exclusive OPTIONS in this or that moment, it’s just that my brain is very prone to respond to the world around me by presenting me with both kinds of option equally readily. Make sense?

@ EJ

Humans seem to love breaking people into “personal types”

As an extrovert Capricorn Yorkshireman, I’m a bit sceptical about that.

EJ – her video lectures don’t talk too much about what the actual research behind the models is, but her books do. They seem to (largely) check out to me, but I’m no expert, either. I do consider myself a skeptical layperson with reasonable science literacy, though. She claims that the quiz she uses to determine brain systems was able to successfully predict the results of brain scans in her test groups. Also, my husband also took her quiz, and as far as her theory about romantic compatibility goes, we did check out pretty perfectly. So there’s that.

@LG:
Thanks very much. That’s a little disappointing, but I think I might just be irrationally enthusiastic when it comes to such things.

I was hoping that she had devised it by observing the actual neurological effects of the hormones in question and working out the effects that this would have on human behaviour, not that she had devised a quiz which simply predicted them to a fair degree of accuracy.

Ah well.

EJ – Oh, don’t worry, there’s much more than that. That was just a notable example.

Her website might be a decent place to start. Haven’t checked it out, yet. Will do right now.